Australia is deporting a convicted British rapist back to the UK after he served 12 years in jail for an attack on a woman whom he kidnapped and then raped in a makeshift dungeon.

Leslie Cunliffe, 63, posed as a police officer to kidnap a 21-year-old university student in the Geelong suburb of Belmont. He gagged, blindfolded and bound her, strapped a fake bomb to her and raped her. The attack was likened to a scene from Thomas Harris's novel Silence of the Lambs.

Cunliffe then demanded A$1m in ransom from the student's family during the May 1999 attack near Melbourne, Victoria. Police compared the dungeon where Cunliffe imprisoned the woman for seven hours to something akin to Harris's novel, the Geelong Advertiser reported.

Cunliffe, who is a British passport holder, served 12 years of a 15-year sentence in prison in Australia for the rape before being freed from the Marngoneet correctional centre in Lara, Victoria, this April. Immigration officials in Victoria detained him on Thursday, and he is now being held at an immigration detention centre there, awaiting his deportation back to Britain.

No date has been set for his return.

A spokeswoman for Australia's immigration department said: "Officers are undertaking to remove [him] to the UK. It will be as soon as practical." The Australian authorities cancelled his visa on "character" grounds under a provision in their Immigration Act , which allows them to remove those convicted of serious offences.

A series of ageing British sex offenders have been deported to the UK under Australia's tough immigration policy.

One paedophile, Raymond Horne, was removed to Britain in March 2008 having served a 12-year prison sentence for 14 sex offences. He lured two homeless boys, aged 13 and 15, to his flat while volunteering for a charity.

Horne had moved to Queensland from Britain in 1952, but never became an Australian citizen and on his release the authorities revoked his visa.

Robert Excell was deported to Britain six years ago after spending 37 years in Australian prisons for child sex convictions dating back to 1965, when he raped a seven-year-old boy. Excell was born in the UK and emigrated to Australia when he was 10, but never took citizenship.

Simon Wilson, a convicted murderer and serial rapist, who had lived in Australia since he was two, was sent back to Britain in January 2008 after being released on licence from a life sentence for killing an elderly woman whom he had punched repeatedly. Three months later, in the UK, he attacked and tried to rape a 71-year-old woman in Camden, north London.